Saturday, 31 August 2013

I do not know if this is a general feeling among the readers
of this blog or not, but I found the discussions around John Lynn’s book ‘Battle’
helpful and illuminating. While I do not think that Lynn has completely proved
his case, I think that it has opened up, for me at least, an interesting line
of thinking about wargaming.

If you recall, Lynn’s case was that there is a discourse of
war that goes along with the reality of war, and that the two interact with
each other. Changes in the reality of war, such as the massed death meted out
at the start of the First World War impacted on the discourse. From being
heroic in 1914, warfare became much
grimmer and, by the early 1930’s, say, an English University Union could vote
that it would not fight for its country.

That change in discourse, arguably, interacted at least with
the political process of going to war. The British policy of appeasement was
motivated, in part, by the desire of the political elite to avoid another Great
War. This is not unusual in history. For example, it is arguable that James II
fled London and England in 1688 to avoid another English Civil War, which had
seen so much destruction and, of course, the execution of his father.

So the discourse of war, the expectations of war which the
political and military classes have, and the reality of war, interact. Lynn
tries to get a handle on these discourses by looking at the war literature of
the periods he chooses for case studies. It is here, it seems, that his thesis
becomes a little unstuck. The claim, for example, that it is only with Napoleon
that the idea of a decisive battle emerged, was shown not to be the case.
Previous generals could and did seek decisive battles; the true innovation of
the Napoleonic era was, probably, simply the size of the battles in terms of
combatants.

So the problem that Lynn’s thesis seems to run into is that
which in fact he predicts in the introduction to his book. In detail, his
thesis fails, at least insofar as it is focussed on decisive battles. However,
he does do a valuable service, I think, for us as wargamers, in that he draws
our attention towards the discourse of warfare in the different periods he
covers. It is this aspect that I would like to try to focus upon.

One consequence of the discussions around Lynn’s book was
that my attention was drawn to du Picq’s book ‘Battle Studies’, in that, as
opposed to Lynn, du Picq emphasises the continuities of warfare. By this I mean
that, to some extent (and du Picq brackets out ‘modern warfare’ by which he
presumably means that of the mid-nineteenth century), the over-riding issue is
the morale and moral fibre of the troops. Now, it is possible that this should
be read against the background of nineteenth century society, where, for
example, it was said that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, and
that one was expected to “play up and play the game”, even when walking
wounded. But it is also possible that du Picq has something important to say about
warfare generally, and to us as historical wargamers in particular.

So, the idea I have for the next few weeks is to try to read
some of the more important texts of warfare that I can find, and to try to draw
out from them interesting and useful things for us as wargamers. I am trying to
find texts which are available free on the internet, in the hope that I will
not have to do this alone, but some of you will be able to read along and
participate. Indeed, if you let me know (via the comments), you can write blog
articles about them as well, and I will post them.

One of the potential issues with doing this, of course, is
that I am not an expert on all of the eras covered, or indeed, any of them. So
I will need some help, particularly for anything after the end of the
seventeenth century.

So, which texts?

Obviously, I have not created an exhaustive list, and I am
conscious of having missed some, either because I forgot at the time, or have
not found a free copy of item. At present, the list is:

The Art of War Sun
Tzu

De Re Militari Vegetius

The Art of War Machiavelli

Concerning Battle Montecuccoli

Reveries on the Art of War de
Saxe

Military Instructions Frederick
of Prussia

The Art of War Jomini

Battle Studies du
Picq

On War Clausewitz

All of these, except Montecuccoli, are freely available in
PDF of Kindle (or other) format. Montecuccoli appears in the list because I
happen to have a copy of his work.

The ordering is a bit interesting, as well. I am actually
going to start with Vegetius, because he had huge influence over the medieval
military mind. I suppose that it could be argued that I should start with Su
Tzu, but I am a westerner, living in the west and wargaming western subjects.
So far as I am aware, Sun Tzu was not translated into a western language before
the late eighteenth century, and so had little influence on western military
thinking before then.

Now, the above list seems to me to be a little daunting, so
I am not promising that this idea will be done quickly, or indeed that it will
ever be finished. However, I do think that it might be interesting, and even
getting started might shine some light on our discourses as wargaming.

As I said above, I do need some help, not just encouragement,
in reading the texts listed above. Also, I need some help in identifying the
gaps in the above list. I am conscious, for example, that Arrian is not there.
If you do know of texts missing, especially of freely available texts online,
the do please let me know, and I will add them to the list.

And so to the first of the texts – De Re Militari, and the
late Roman Empire.

Saturday, 24 August 2013

It has always been something of a mystery to me why many
wargamers have developed a taste for the exotic. I suppose that as wargaming
and communication technologies have developed, the opportunity to find
something really off the wall has presented itself. Thus, we land up with, for
example, 1920’s Chinese Warlord games, or skirmishes on the Thai frontier, or
such like.

Now, I am not denigrating these sorts of wargames, although I
confess that they are not for me. The thing that puzzles me slightly is that
finding anything out about them is, even in the days of the Internet, really
rather difficult. Part of me wants to wonder if that is not the reason why some
wargamers choose to play in these eras; it makes the research so much easier if
no-one actually knows.

A long time ago now, one of the wargames magazines ran an
article on what to do if you feel a bit jaded with your wargaming, a bit out of
sorts and out of ideas. Have a look around your local area, it suggested. You
might be surprised as to what ideas lie out there.

This may well work a little better in the Old World than in
the New, but it is, I think, an idea worth pursuing. History, like geography,
is all around us, but often we manage to ignore it, or simply pass it by
altogether. Part of being a history ‘buff’ or a wargamer is, surely, to try not
to ignore the military activity on our doorstep.

On the face of it, I live in a pretty boring part of the
country, militarily. Too far away from the continent to have any decent
defences against invasion, probably too poor to be really interesting to anyone
except other sheep farmers, and really rather out on a limb, geographically
speaking. In fact, so far as I can tell, most wargamers only know where I live
because the local market town is named (for reasons I cannot account for) on
the Kingmaker map.

So, let me look a little closer.

In fact, my area is a wee bit more interesting that it
appears at first glance. To start with, I can think of at least five medieval
battles that were fought within a forty mile radius. Not all of them were the
Scots against the English, either, although granted that does seem to have been
a medieval hobby for the local gentry (and the Bishop of Durham). So that is
something that may well take up a fair bit of a wargamer’s time.

Secondly, I live a bit south of one of the most northerly
Roman villas in the UK. Oddly, there is a cluster of known villas in the sort
of middle reaches of the River Tees.

Why, you might ask, were they there?

The answer, I think, is access to the sea. The river is
fairly wide there, and is passable by small boats, so in terms of getting
supplies in and out, for the Romans it was a simple business of loading up a
few merchant ships and waiting for the right tide.

I suspect that as modern people, we forget (or at least I
do) exactly how much easier sea transport was until at least the 18th
Century. It was safer from bandits, for one thing, and quite a lot harder to
get lost on (provided you stuck to the coastal routes). While, of course, ships
were often lost at sea, they could also carry bulk cargoes more easily and
cheaply than wagons, even if the wagons were on Roman built roads.

So the Tees-side Roman villas were, probably, commercial
enterprises, although who exactly they were supplying is anyone’s guess. They
could even have transported grain to Newcastle and the granaries there at the
end of Hadrian’s Wall, but that is pure speculation on my part.

A little bit south of where I live are the ruins of a much
smaller Roman villa. This was probably not a commercial enterprise, but simply
supplied the local estate, maybe with a little left over for buying a few
luxuries. Interestingly, the ruins are next to a modern Farm Shop, which
performs a similar sort of function.

A little bit further away there are more Roman bits a
pieces. There is a bridge, a town (site of another possible medieval
battlefield) and a few small forts. Some of these have been investigated
archaeologically, and one of the good things about the Internet is that it is
possible to find the reports (although often you have to buy them). While these
are frequently bogged down with detail about pots, they occasionally give
interesting snippets for the wargamer’s imagination, such as destruction
layers.

I have not even mentioned anything more ‘up to date’ so far,
although there was certainly activity hereabouts during the English Civil War.
The local history society believes that there was a firing range over the back
of the village. I am, in all honesty, not sure I believe that; ECW outposts did
not often have spare powder and shot to waste practicing, although I could
believe pot shots at rabbits or similar game.

The point that I am trying to make is that, in parts of the
world at least, there are rich layers of history just lying about, waiting for
the wargamer to discover them. With a little bit of imagination an interesting
back story could be created for most of them, and suddenly you have a wargame
on your hands.

You do have, however, to stop, and look around, a bit more
closely at some of the places which are in your local environment. As I said,
often, we take these places for granted.

Also, I suspect that often we prefer the exotic to the
local. If you feel that your local history has little to commend it, then consider
this: If there were a large wargaming community in the Far East, they may well
consider, say, the Hundred Years War as being really exotic.

Saturday, 17 August 2013

I have been reading a bit about ancient wars and battles,
specifically, for those of you with long memories, those in the Greek and
Classical worlds. One of the things that has struck me is the large number of
light troops which are attached to the armies.

Numbers, in the ancient world are, of course, always rather
dubious. However, the normally reliable Thucydides reports 10,000 Boeotian
light troops present at Delium, although they had little influence on the
battle (IV.93). Sabin, in Lost Battles, represents them with one ‘token’ levy
unit.

Wargame rules (and writers of history, both ancient and
modern) tend to be rather dismissive of skirmishers. I myself have fallen into
this: in Polemos: SPQR a base of skirmishers is set at being about 75 people
running around with javelins and so forth. Now if I transferred that to Delium,
I would need over 130 bases of skirmishers alone, which would fill up most
people’s wargame table without any of the battle-winning troop types getting a
look in.

It seems to be the case therefore that while my
representational scale might be awry, the effects could be accurate.
Skirmishers had very little impact on the ancient battle. I know that there are
occasional exceptions, but in the ancient world they tended to be peltasts, who
appear to have been more professional and capable than your average javelin
chucker.

It also has to be admitted that many sets of wargame rules
do not represent skirmishers terribly well. Notoriously, in one of the version
of DBM, a single base of skirmishers, set at an angle to a block of advancing
heavy infantry, could delay the latter hugely. Treating skirmishers as just
another troop type with compatible capabilities does not seem to represent
their actual activity terribly well.

The other problem, of course, is that ancient writers were
not, in fact, terribly interested in skirmishers. They were not of the right
class, for one thing. Battles were won and lost by the heavy infantry (I
generalise, but then, so did they). Skirmishers were the necessary but
uninteresting part of the army. Exceptions do, of course, occur, but in general,
light troops are not discussed or reported upon. Again, peltasts may be, but
the general skirmisher is not.

So, how can we handle skirmishers within our wargame rules?

In Polemos: SPQR, as I have said, a base represents about 75
men, which, I confess, is probably incorrect. However, in my defence, I have
come up with a novel (to me, anyway; I don’t imagine that it is original)
method of modelling the performance of skirmishers.

If you read the few accounts that there are of skirmish type
tactics in the ancient world, I do not think that you find the more modern
ideas of ‘clouds of skirmishers’ or skirmishers advancing in open order. The
best description of skirmishing is not, in fact, from skirmishers at all
(please correct me if I’m wrong), but of the Persian cavalry at Plataea. Here,
they advance in groups, throw javelins at the Greek hoplites and then retire to
the main body.

There is no description of the cavalry being in open order,
just advancing in smaller groups from the main body, discharging missile
weapons, and then retiring.

The more I thought about this, the more likely it seemed to
me to be generally the case for ancient world skirmishing. In the ancient
world, there was much less emphasis, in the first place, on the individual, and
so individualistic activity, like skirmishing 10 feet or so from your
neighbour, is less likely. Additionally, I cannot imagine that any such troops
would be trained and so, as I believe it to be the case, that untrained troops
tend to huddle together, it seems to me highly likely that skirmishers would
too.

There are other factors at play, as well. At Caharre, as is
well known, the Parthians skirmished pretty well all day. They must have had
some means of relieving their front forces, if only to resupply with arrows.
This is much simpler if the whole unit was not involved at a given time. If a
bunch of 50 men were dispatched from a unit of 500, for, say, ten minutes skirmishing,
then each batch of fifty would have about an hour and a half to rest in between
such activity, while the enemy simply saw a screen of men discharging arrows at
them, constantly. The rest could be seeing to their horses, restocking with
arrows, having a drink and a bite to eat, and so on.

What is very wearing for one side would be a walk in the
park for the other.

Of course, the commanders would need to be careful to keep
their units out of harm’s way, and we do read often of the skirmishers simply
being chased off by heavier troops. However, they usually did reform and
return, which suggests, in my model, that the charged skirmishers simply run
back to the mother unit and reform upon it.

This then, is the model I have attempted to work with in
Polemos: SPQR, and intend to implement in the Greek rules when they finally get
off the drawing board. Skirmisher units represent the base unit, and their
range represents the distance to which the packets of men are sent out to throw
their javelins (or whatever). The whole unit is not fighting at any one time,
nor are the men standing at the base and shooting. Only a small proportion of
them are doing that at any one time.

Of course, it is still required that the skirmisher’s action
is still, mostly, disruptive, not fatal to the enemy. That can be fixed through
the relevant combat factors, of course. And
the units under attack can still advance to drive off the skirmishers, although
they would have to get at the mother unit to do any real damage. A failure by
the skirmishers to inflict any damage
can, of course, be interpreted as a local success by the attacked base.

Finally, of course, I can now rationalise my representative
scale. A base of skirmishers can represent many more than 75 individuals, but
it is that 75 who are in action at any one time. The overall base would
represent, say, 750 individuals, which makes it much more viable to have the
whole lot on the table at any one time.

So, there you are: a model of skirmishing in the ancient
world. I wonder how much it leaks…

Saturday, 10 August 2013

It was mentioned, I think, on the Joy and Forgetfulness blog
recently, that we have, as wargamers, our key battles. These are the actions
that interest us, that we keep coming back to and having another go at, or,
perhaps, we have never tried but are our goals or aim, when we get the right
figures painted, or the right terrain constructed, or the right rules, or some
combination of all three.

For me, this battle is Marathon, and this arises because one
of the first reports of a wargame I ever read was by Charles Grant in ‘Military
Modelling’, and was of this battle. It was a long time ago and I was very, very
young, but it made a lasting impression on me. For years, at the back of my
mind was the idea that someday, I would refight on the wargame table, the
battle of Marathon.

For many years, of course, I did not even try to refight it.
I have a limited time budget, and even more limited resources for buying,
painting and researching figures. However, after a major effort in the last few
weeks, I am now the proud possessor of a 21 base Persian army, suitable, so far
as I can tell, for being the opposition to my Greeks at Marathon.

Now, of course, I should be rushing off in glee and be
rolling dice. Perhaps, however, I have become too cautious, or elderly, in just
plain suspicious of the historical accounts of battles to do so. I need some
sort of idea as to what Marathon was about, how it happened, before setting
figure to table.

This is, of course, where the fun starts. Herodotus’ account
of the actual battle of Marathon is four paragraphs (6:112 – 115), just about a
page in my Landmark edition. This is not really very much, although of course
the build-up to the battle is much longer. The brevity has both upsides and
downsides.

On the up-side, it does mean that, as a wargamer, I do not actually
have to read very much before I have an idea of the action, its deployments,
movements and outcome. It really is very simple. The Athenians and Plataeans
lined up, charged the Persians, broke their wings and turned in on the hitherto
successful centre, capturing a few ships on the way. What could be simpler?

On the downside, the record does not really tell us enough
about the action. Lots of questions remain unanswered. For example, where were
the Persian cavalry? The Persians landed at Marathon, we are told, because it
was good cavalry country (6:102). But mounted activity is not recorded in the
battle account itself. A puzzle, then.

Not only that, but the number of Persians in the army is not
really recorded at all. Herodotus records 600 triremes in the Persian fleet,
including horse transports. This might give some sort of figure for the maximum
number of people in the force, but helps very little in determining the number
of soldiers on the battlefield. Herodotus’ claim that there were 6,400 Persian
casualties may, or may not, be correct. Even if it is correct, it does not help
an awful lot. It gives a lower limit for how many Persians there were in total
(6400, plus at least 1 trireme crew?), but that is really of little use.

From the information we have to hand, then, we can say that
there were 10,000, or 11,000 Greeks, and some Persians. It is usually assumed
that the Persians outnumbered the Greeks, but this is by no means certain. It
is quite possible that there were fewer Persians on the field than Greeks.

There are further problems with the terrain of Marathon.
While the general layout is well known, a plain with the sea on one side, hills
on the other, and marshes at both ends, it is not actually recorded at what
angle the Persians deployed to the beach. Some modern accounts have them with
their backs to the sea, with their ships behind them. Some have them deployed
at right angles to the sea, with the ships behind their left wing.

Neither of these accounts is wholly satisfactory. Only an
idiot, perhaps, would fight with their backs to the sea. The advantage of this deployment,
however, is that it is clear how the routing Persians could then attempt to
launch their ships. In the other scenario, with their wings broken first, it
seems a bit unlikely that the Persians would have all streamed to their left
rear to get away. As Terry Pratchett once remarked, the whole idea of running
away is to get away; routing troops are unlikely to think that the best result
would be obtained by running through a bunch of disorganised but victorious
hoplites.

So, even with such a simple appearing account of a fairly
straightforward battle, we have some seemingly unsolvable problems. The size of
at least one of the armies; the composition of that force itself. Even the
deployment of the forces is by no means obvious.

In fact, were it not the case that it is impossible to read
the account of the battle without trying to reconstruct it in some way, I would
argue that we face an insurmountable obstacle. The account of Herodotus has
sufficient detail to constrain what we can do in reconstruction, but
insufficient to tell us exactly how the action happened.

Perhaps, at this point, turning to Phil Sabin’s Lost Battles
might help. There are a large number of modern accounts of Marathon, all
differing in detail. Sabin’s modelling for the battle suggests that the key
factor is, in fact, the number of Persian infantry, not the location and
actions of the cavalry or the angle between the armies and the sea. As he
notes, the triumph of the Persian centre indicates that the Greeks had no
unqualified superiority over their enemy (p 95).

So, in summary, we have not just a refight of Marathon, but
a whole slew of considerations, estimates, guesswork and prejudice to work
through before we can come to something that could even slightly be called a historical
battle. That should not, of course, stop of from trying, but we do have to
admit that the relation to history is, at best, irrecoverable.

Saturday, 3 August 2013

I have written a lot over time, and quite recently, about
models and how we use them in wargaming. It is worth considering, I think,
because wargaming, and writing wargme rules are essentially modelling activities.
There is no getting away from the concepts of models at all.

Models, of course, come in various shapes and sizes. There
are scale models, representational models, computational models and so on, all
of which, I think, appear in most wargames. But it is also worth taking a bit
of a step back and considering exactly what the models are, and what they can
do.

In Chapter 3 of Ian Barbour’s Models, Myths and Paradigms
(London, SCM, 1974), there is a list of four ways of understanding models in
science. These are naïve realism, positivism, instrumentalism and critical
realism. I will have a go at describing how these models might fit into a set
of wargame rules, and which interpretations of our models we might choose.

Firstly, then, naïve realism. In this case we assume that
our models give us direct access to the world. The entities we postulate in our
models are those which ‘really’ exist, even if they are not directly
observable. For wargaming, this means, for example, that we would have to claim
that the factors we use to calculate a wargame unit’s morale were really
existing factors, and that they can be summed up and reach a given outcome of ‘hold’
or ‘rout’. This is really rather, um, naïve, as the name of this view suggests.
Morale calculation is a computational model, and bears little relationship to
the real world.

Naïve realism corresponds to a literal view of models, that
is, that the model is a replica of the world. While some of the bits of a
wargame might correspond to bits of the world, for example our soldiers are
scale models of real soldiers, I do not think that many wargamers would fall
into the trap that our wargames are one to one readings of the real world, although
some wargamers do seem to sometimes speak or write as if they are. Literalism,
however, runs the risk of pushing the model too hard, of expecting, in the
morale example, soldiers too be looking around and thinking ‘enemy on flank,
that’s bad, taking casualties, that’s bad, rear support, that’s good. Hmm, two
bads and one good, and a roll of two on the dice. That’s it, I’m running away.’
This is not a realistic model of morale in the real world.

Secondly, we have positivism. This argues that all a model
is is a representation of experience, a convenient way of classifying empirical
data. This claims that all we have is a means of correlating data. In wargame
terms, this suggests that all we can do is give a relationship between a cause
and an effect. Thus, if the effect is ‘the infantry run away’, the cause ‘the
cavalry charged’ is correlated with it. Those who have good memories, or who
know something about empiricism will observe the hand of David Hume sitting on
this idea.

So far was wargaming goes, I think, positivism is not
terribly helpful. A positivist will claim that a model has no real use, and is
simply a means of abstracting from data. Thus, in this concept, we would be
unable to wargame anything except historical battles. In science terms,
positivism means that theories are stripped of their predictive ability. In
wargame terms, then, we are limited to the strict data of history. This seems
unlikely to produce a satisfactory wargame.

Thirdly, there is the idea of instrumentalism. This is
similar to positivism in that the claim is made that our models are not
representations of the world, are not true or false, but techniques for
creating inferences. The argument here is that the terms of a model cannot be
translated into observational terms, at least directly. Again, using wargame
morale as an example, we can see that this might well be the case. We can
assess, as a wargamer, the morale of a unit, but that assessment is not
translatable into the real world directly, as I argued above. Instrumentalism,
however, allows that our concepts and models may have results that are discernible
in the real world. Real army units do, from time to time, run away, and the
outcome of our models can predict that, even though the computational aspect of
has no real world equivalent.

A model, then, in this view, is neither true nor false, neither
accurate nor not. It is simply a useful way of giving us mental devices for
thinking about things. Once we
understand the data and the theory behind the model, the claim is, we can
discard the model; it has outlived its usefulness. In the case of, for example,
wargame morale, this seems unlikely to be the case.

Finally, we have critical realism. Here, theories are
representations of the world; theories are true and useful,, but incomplete and
selective. Models are abstract systems, representative of some bits of the real
world, created in our imaginations for a given purpose. A model, then, is an
inexact account of the world, missing out huge chunks in an effort to provide
something that is intelligible and tractable. Thus, a model will need
validating against real world data. This, in science, is the role of
experiment, while in wargaming is the role of historical accounts of battles.

It seems to me that models in wargame ruleas are something
of a mix of instrumentalist models, such as calculations of morale, and
critically realist models, such as combat rules. In the first, the calculation
bears no relationship to the actual real world process of how units ‘decide’ to
stand or run. Thus all we can do is make the calculation and compare it with empirical
outcomes.

In the second case, we can actually see the process of
combat in some sort of detail, and, in a highly selective manner, model it, comparing
the model and its stages with the real world and its outcomes.

But, at the end of the day, we do seem to need both concepts
of models to create a wargame rule set.